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May I grab this no particular occasion and ask English speakers: is this natural to you? A near miss? I mean, a near miss is something I would expect from sports where a shooter nearly misses the target but manages to hit it but barely. How is an avoided collision a near miss...? Close call, close to a collision, but a near miss?

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I think this expression would be familiar to most native English speakers, but it is idiomatic.

It's using "near" as a synonym to "close" -- as in "a close shave" (actually close) rather than as a synonym for "close to" as it is in the expression "near death" (almost, but not quite dead).

The second sense is definitely more common.

This post suggests "near miss" became common as a military phrase to mean "missed, but still damaged the target" but changed as it entered the vernacular:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-nea1.htm

It's definitely a strange phrase in some ways. But I would say that the way the wording makes sense if you consider 'near' to be an adjective to 'miss' and that 'near' in this case means 'close' and not something else like 'approximate'.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/near_miss

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